Wednesday, 11 September 2013

Half the Sky: Endangered on Earth

Primetime television commercials and full-page
newspaper jackets zoom on fresh young
faces and sleek new gizmos stressing how technology has moved forward since the
time of Ambassador cars and HMT watches. If you have any memory of the Licence Raj
economy, when stifling entrepreneurship was the raison d’etre of the system,
the brave bold today ads flaunt a brash, happening India.

We are made to believe that because of a new car
model hitting the road every three months or the screen of our television
getting bigger and bigger, we have been able to usher in a new dawn and leave
behind all that was old and stagnant. But modern machines do not make modern
people. Technology is most certainly a major route for reformist change, but
its role as an instrument of change depends on its users and so it can be as
potent in propagating stultifying stereotypes. Technology can help us grow in
the direction we want but may not be able to help if we are misdirected. Just
think of the supercomputer which can be used to trace the footprints of an
erratic monsoon and – and develop nuclear weapons as well.

Moreover, when newer electronic avatars threaten to
throw asunder the old order, the keepers of the crusted establishment know a
thing or two about protecting the status quo. When a Khap panchayat in Uttar
Pradesh banned the use of cell phones by women, the diktat of the
male-chauvinist kangaroo court sought to put an end to the many possibilities
technology held for women in those remote villages, because the holders of
power saw a definite threat in the little device. The exclusively male group was
afraid that the SIM in the hands of the ‘onion peelers’ could shake the ground
beneath the smug footholds of patriarchy. (You see, all it takes is a missed call.) At
such times, it is not technology but its users who would have to intervene.
What would need to come into play are something as basic as the human values of
courage and empathy. These cannot be substituted by technology.

The other aspect of the date between gadgetry and youth has been that while access to knowledge
has never been easier, while participatory platforms have never been wider,
these alone are not sufficient to pave the way towards a more egalitarian
world. Yes, we now know a lot more; yes, we now are more on talking
terms with more of those like us . .
. But has all this ‘increased talktime’ helped the urban, privileged lot to
reach out? Has it helped us be more sensitive to those that fight the
survival battle in Other India, the vast tribal hinterland unvisited by the
laptop and fast-food culture?

Then there is the question of those who do try to use
modern media and technology to change warped mindsets. A social campaign against
rape by a Bollywood personality comes to mind. The heart of the campaign may be
in the right place, its intentions noble. But the principle of gender
sensitivity is carried only halfway through. So while its aim is to end gender
violence, the logic is flawed. It does affirm that women have their own
identity and that they should not endure violence but these right noises get
lost in the absence of a sharper focus. It reminds men of the many roles women
play in their lives and how, therefore, they should be respected. Maybe inadvertently,
but it ends up encouraging the notion that women have to be related to men and
their lives in order to be deserving of this respect. It talks of what ‘real
men’ do, thus solidifying gender binaries and stressing that there is something
quintessentially masculine and feminine instead of an
all-encompassing humane bracket. It
is naïve to say that as men would take time to come out of familiar categories
and would feel lost if old certainties are taken away, first one should expect them to
become better men and then better human beings. The gender binary in our
society is hugely skewed. One cannot take five hundred years to achieve step one,
the next five hundred to step two. We can’t apologetically shrug and say that, till
then, we would have to accept the present forms of violence arising from prejudices
we are wary of disturbing, while new kinds of attacks each day continue to take
place. This is precisely why the more things change, the more they remain the
same.

At the same time, to achieve a fast solution, one ought
not to pluck a half-ripe principle. Even if we forget the ideal of honest means
for an honest end, this is not sustainable. If a man tries to be a ‘real man’
by not hitting his partner, he may also have some expectations from her that he
thinks should be fulfilled by a ‘real woman’. So, at its very inception, such patchy
logic is ridden with holes.

The sellers and propagators of technology, companies
offering new technological ‘solutions’ every day and swearing by the notion of
‘progress’, cannot operate in a value-neutral vacuum. If women are threatened
with rape on Rediff chat or Twitter, the portal and service providers cannot
throw up their hands at these ‘non-technical’ issues. They are being run by
people, not machines, who are a living-thinking-feeling part of our society and
they cannot but address these violations in the strictest manner possible. Such contradictions are also blatant when
‘new age’ IT companies practise gender-based wage difference and evade putting
women in top positions notwithstanding their merit.

On a personal level, I have felt this yawning
(literally) gap in the modernity of a techno-savvy blooming glowing shining
dining young India and the way we lead our lives and make our choices time and
again. A year or so back, when people I know had not started chiding me for the
pounds I had gained, I got a call from a friend in advertising. A couple of
actors/models had backed out at the last moment, and my friend had been
assigned the task of looking for replacements. I have problems with something
as commercial as product endorsements. But this was to be for a publication and
promised a ‘public interest’ message. I love doing different things; this was
something I had never done before, and I got all ears for the details. She
described the scene to be shot to me.

Two women are in a public space, a man tries to
harass one, the woman is nervous, the other woman intervenes, thus lending
strength and solidarity to the first one. It seemed simple enough. It wasn’t. The
two women could not be just any women. They had to be a particular sort. The
target: thin, preferably fair. The intervener: someone bigger. I had to be the
target. Always allergic to stereotypes, I asked to play the latter. My friend
went back to the director and asked him. He said he couldn’t flip, that he had
visualized the scene a certain way and couldn’t play with the aesthetics of it,
and that it wasn’t about stereotypes. I wasn’t convinced, and my two minutes of
potential fame went down the archetypal drain in less than two minutes.

My first job involved working on the Right to
Information. A journalist friend informed that her magazine’s next issue was on
young activists and for a change they wanted not models but activists for the
cover. I appreciated the nous of the magazine in wanting to have real, ‘flawed’,
and not airbrushed people on the cover, something that most mainstream
magazines are loath to do. As for being on the cover, I felt I was young enough
but not activist enough. I asked her if I could pass the brief around, thinking
I’d ask a young friend who had been engaged with activism longer than I had. My
journalist friend asked her editor. She reverted to hesitantly inform me that
while the magazine was looking for activists, they wanted someone thin, and
preferably fair. I stated that I wasn’t up for it if such were the criteria for
selection. But I told my other colleagues about the opportunity. (Looking back,
I felt I shouldn’t have passed the word around for a shoot that ostensibly
chose people for their work but based on their skin colour and body type.) I
thought I shouldn’t impose my opinions on them. Finally, someone was chosen from
our group who, though not fair, was slim enough but was even newer to activism
than I was.

The cover needed men too. When my friend proffered,
they required him to get rid of his facial hair. He refused.

The magazine cover we eventually saw on the stands had
some stiff models, except the person chosen from our organization, in
fashionably ‘ethnic’ clothing. Considering that the magazine was conforming to
stereotypes, it hadn’t done a great job of it. The models were more
‘model-like’ than ‘activist-like’ but, the lord be blessed, reflected enough
white light and had all the right angles.

That we live in a regressive society riddled with
stereotypes around gender, class, caste, race and religion is yesterday’s news.
But the jab of disappointment is particularly sharp when as young people, ‘with
it’ in every way and adept in playing with the toys of technology, we go back
to walking on all fours the moment we are called upon to stand up for things. In
the first instance, a young director, in whose hands sophisticated technology
willingly yielded to enhance his creativity, felt turning stereotypes on their
heads would interfere with aesthetics. I do not have his skills, experience and
expertise, and I am in no position to question them. But can aesthetics and
politics not go hand in hand? Does art have to be apolitical and politics unaesthetic?

When I ask
my friends in advertising about why commercials still try so hard to conform,
they say that while they are dying to do brave new work, their clients are
afraid of taking risks and have no romantic notions about traversing the road
less taken. So on screen, we hardly see men changing diapers and women being
the breadwinners, though such real-life instances have been around for quite
some time now, even if they aren’t the norm yet. Technology, claiming to
deliver things ahead of our times, fails when as popular media it cannot even
keep pace with the times.

Of course, there
do exist some young people discerning enough to acknowledge that this is not
how it should be. Having studied literature,
my friend went for an advertising course hoping to introduce to that world the
gender sensitivity and non-conformity she had always believed in and absorbed
even better in college. Upon joining the new course, it did not take her long
to grasp that advertising expected her not to use her previous education but unlearn
it. She tried to change things, came up with exciting presentations of her
ideas but nothing budged. She ultimately decided to quit and got back to
academics, instead of doing something that flew in the face of all she stood
for.

There are also
some who stay but keep trying to create a dent instead of allowing themselves
to get completely co-opted. An editor I know ensures that the primary school
textbooks she handles have Ravi and Sunil fetching water and doing other
household chores, apart from studying.
‘No Malti or Susheela would ever wash utensils in by book, while Ram
goes to school,’ she promises. While publishing is a business, she ensures that
being responsible for the content she does not lend a hand in planting gender
stereotypes in young minds.

If there
were more such who insisted on pushing against the wall instead of predicting
it won’t give way, or resisted becoming a part of something they did not
believe in, if we did not let ourselves be a supine mass of wood floating in
any direction that wind or water would deign to carry it, undoubtedly the
tectonic shift one had never dared to hope for because of its scale would
have happened. Still can.

In the case of the magazine cover, we had a
well-established publication for the youth trying to do something different and
real. But the media house was trying to be radical in a halfway, conditional manner,
not confident that their young readership would be welcoming enough of their
initiative. When I was in the Film and Television Institute, Pune, we had a
guest lecture by young film-maker Dibakar Banerjee. He has contributed gems to
the Hindi film industry like Oye Lucky! Lucky
Oye!, Love Sex Aur Dhokha and Shanghai. Among other things, his films
often expose middle-class hypocrisies. In each of his works, he has shown brilliant
film-making and has got his politics right, thereby answering the question of
the compatibility of politics and aesthetics. Speaking to us, he shared his
frustration over how young couples ‘modern’ in every sense of the term would
say that they cannot marry each other because one of theirs is a no-onions-nor-garlic
family. No different are our matrimonial ads where the young gleefully
participate with their parents in a caste-based elimination-selection of
prospective partners.

In Love Sex
Aur Dhokha, we witness an India which is abreast with technological
advancement but is actually using it to fulfil its greed, creating a divide
between the doer (the user of technology) and the done upon (the ones against whom technology has been used).
One example shown in the movie, and something rampant in recent India, is the
use of hidden cameras for pornography and blackmail. The employment of
technology to commit crimes like foeticide is also common amongst the middle
class. At the other end of this lie our daily soaps where they reveal that
girls are valuable indeed and, of course, the best way to understand this is to
see them performing sacrifices and participating in trials by fire, all in
order to do what they do best – ‘keep the family together’.

All these issues are related to the young
inhabitants of India, who know their iPods like the back of their hand but are
shy of breaking free of the old dogmas on which they base their lives. The old principles
– honesty, truth, standing up for ourselves and others, sharing our privileges –
lying forgotten are the inconvenient ones. Even as I wrote this, it came as a
small shock to me that I paused to think of whether there are ‘cooler’
substitutes for these words; words that should have been basic to our existence
now sound ‘loaded’, ‘outdated’, ‘moralistic’, as if human values also come with
an expiry date, and all rights and wrongs have become perspectival (unless we
are at the receiving end of those wrongs). Those of us who have discarded all
ideologies need to find them back. Those who think who they have them need to
probe deeper to practise them with complete scrupulousness. The young,
technology-driven India is an India privileged like never before. But on the
other side, there’s the underprivileged India, some of whose young members are
fighting brave battles on their personal and societal fronts. The privileged
India cannot simply be the benefactor of a modern India and refuse to acknowledge
its accountability. If a girl from a family where ‘honour killing’ is a
threat runs away to escape a fate imposed by her family, she is of huge
inspiration to me. People like us are clearly better ensconced and do not run
risks so dire. In comparison, and also in deference, to that girl if we do not
even shake ourselves out of our stupor to assert to our (surely, more
understanding) families a right as basic as that of choosing our partners, we
should shed all pretensions of modernity. One expects this young India to raise
the right questions and find some answers, and if the process causes discomfort
or inconvenience, to kindly deal with it.

After the 16 December rape case in Delhi, we had
cried ourselves hoarse asking the state and the police to deliver justice and
had sworn that we would not let this go on. To fulfil that promise, we ought to
do justice to our own lives as conscientious beings. We have to use technology
and all the privileges we have received as part of the modern world package to
seek and destroy whatever is rotten in the state of India. There is no other
way we can allow ourselves to go on.

i read it in in the morn, and i was thinking about those techno-sexuals whole day. Indeed a must read. Please do write about how personal laws in India, though they violate various fundamental rights(art. 14 and art. 15), are exploiting women, and still unheard and uncared.Thanks and regards.